


Words Unspoken

by Hawkers_Alley



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Break Up, F/M, Long-Distance Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-04
Updated: 2020-03-04
Packaged: 2021-03-01 03:28:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,206
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23018557
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hawkers_Alley/pseuds/Hawkers_Alley
Summary: Sometimes silence is louder than words.
Relationships: Hermione Granger/Ron Weasley
Comments: 7
Kudos: 15





	Words Unspoken

For reasons he still struggled to understand, he had kept the letter. 

It had arrived on a rainy October night, just days before his family gathered to celebrate Halloween with their customary dinner, and had carried the faint scent of alcohol along with rainwater. The handwriting inside had been untidy, the ink smudged across the page as if the hand that penned it had dragged across the page while it traveled across the parchment. 

_I miss you. I can’t imagine my life without you in it. I’ll be home for the holidays. I can’t wait to see you again._

The war had taken much from them, but it had given them the bittersweet gift of the relationship they had craved for nearly a decade but had been too uncertain to commit to. For two years they had flitted across each other’s orbit. She had gone back to Hogwarts with his sister to make up for the year of school she had missed, and he had followed Harry into the Ministry of Magic as an Auror. They had spent that first year as a couple apart, yes, but communication between them had never wavered between meetings. The letters had been many, but they had also been short. It was obvious that their communication skills had always been stunted- the product of being two entirely different creatures brought together by love- but the sex had been good. 

Sometimes she would ask McGonagall for permission to leave the castle grounds during the weekends, and they would spend their nights together in the small apartment he had moved into after he’d been officially hired as an Auror. The unit was smaller than his old bedroom, but it was conveniently located just outside Hogsmeade. It was a temporary arrangement, they had assured each other, until she graduated and settled into a career and his paycheck improved. He had done his best to save up what he could, often depending on his parents to feed him and provide him with assistance here and there, entirely convinced that his dreams of owning a house with the girl he had always loved would come to pass. Ignoring the heaviness that settled in his chest whenever he received her letters had become the norm. He tried not to dwell on it. 

Other times, they would forgo the bed entirely and take trips across the countryside instead. He would fill her ears with stories of too many siblings and not enough gold to keep them afloat, and she would share tales about traveling the world with her parents as an only child. They would walk through parks with their fingers intertwined and eat at nearby restaurants until they could barely manage to waddle back to their hotel room. And then they would snuggle in bed, curled against each other like a pair of content cats. Despite never having been a morning person, he was always first to wake, making sure she had a hearty breakfast and some coffee ready for her before she sprinted off in the direction of the castle that was more home to her than a place by his side. 

He called her his Lady Love. She called him by his given name. 

It had been odd at first. Harry had always introduced Ginny as his girlfriend. Bill had introduced Fleur to the family as his fiance. But his Lady Love always called him Ronald, even in front of people they had never once met. But everything had been new and uncertain. He couldn’t blame her for the hesitation, had chalked it up to the fear of losing him to fate after having lost so much in the war. But part of him still questioned her decision. 

When long shifts at work turned into restless nights, he would gather one of the books she kept gifting him and use it as a table to pen her letters. The contents were as familiar to him as the scars across his fingers. He would question what they were doing.He would question what she wanted from him. He would question if her plans for the future truly involved him, or if he was simply a placeholder in her life until something better came along. The letters never left his apartment, though. For two years, they gathered dust on the floor, wedged between the night table and his bed and obscured from view by his moth-eaten bedskirt. 

Like the roses he’d often admired in his mother’s garden, his Lady Love was as beautiful as she was prickly. What gave him the sweetest moments of his life could also wound him when he least expected it. He convinced himself that he was asking for too much, too soon, and that pressing her on such topics would only drive her away or make things between them uncomfortable. He chose to suffer in silence instead, because being eaten alive by his insecurities was still preferable to losing her forever. 

No, she didn’t have a secret lover. No, she wasn’t using him as a crutch while she found what she was truly looking for in a partner. No, she wasn’t leaving him. No, she didn’t want to leave him. 

But she never made any effort to introduce him to her new colleagues at work after graduation, and she never presented him to her parents after she had their memories restored. Even when he asked her to. Even when he subtly begged her for the meeting more than once. She knew everything about his family, but he had been kept in the dark about the man and woman who had given him life’s most precious gift. He used the war to excuse the actions once more, and set the subject aside for a later time. A better time. 

He loved her harder, though. He would give her his coat when the warm weather gave way to winter and she was too busy to remember her own jacket. Whenever she wondered about with her nose buried inside a book, he would happily guide her along the streets of Diagon with a smile on his face. Eventually, she began to hold his hand in Ministry events as well. She still called him by his given name, but the small gesture public of affection had been reassuring. 

When her job in the Ministry took her to Bulgaria and she wrote about meeting Viktor Krum and his teammates for dinner, he had used her months-long absence to sharpen his physique. He had gifted her a body banded with muscle, and a room filled with roses upon her return. He was never needy while she was gone. Never demanded she stop being who she was. Even when she was in the company of ruggedly handsome men, even when jealousy nipped at his heels like rabid wolves. His love was hers and he knew she would never betray it.

They spent a month together after she returned before the Ministry shipped him off to America for joint training. The letters became less frequent while he was on the field, and they slowly whittled down to planning meetings that felt more like scheduled appointments than dates. When they talked about life over dinner, she would often answer his sentences with a nod and a word or two. She never brought up his job, or how he struggled to fit in when he had never really imagined working as an Auror. He had a feeling that she was just grateful that his unwillingness to pry made him her safe space after dealing with the corrupt politics of the Ministry. 

Once he’d returned to London, he abandoned his apartment in favor of his old bedroom at the Borrow. He had needed a safe space of his own, and his parents had been only too willing to have him fill their now-empty nest fo a couple of days. The experience had been strange. It was there that he had realized that his lover was nothing like his mother, and that their relationship would never be anything like the one he had seen growing up.

“If you love each other,” his father had begun after noticing his morose mood. “You will do everything in your power to make it work. It isn’t always easy, but I can tell you that it is worth it. Finding someone who loves you when you’re at your best is easy, but finding someone who wants to be by your side when everything seems to be going topsy-turvy, well, that’s special.” 

Visiting her that weekend had felt anything but special.

After eating at their favorite place and making their way back to the cottage she had purchased while he had been in training, she had offered him a cup of water. Wine after dinner and before a night of lovemaking had been a tradition of theirs since their first night together. 

“I don’t think I’ll be drinking from now on. It makes my thoughts erratic,” she said, sipping idly from the rim of an expensive-looking brandy glass that he had never before seen. “And it’s unseemly for someone in my position to be seen drinking.”

“Okay.” He tipped the glass back and all but inhaled his water before setting the glass on the table. “I can stop drinking as well, if you’d like me to.”

“If that’s what you want,” she said with a shrug. 

It had been so long since he had thought about what he wanted that the comment startled him. What did he want there, in a cottage he had never stepped foot on and a lover who was more absent than present in his life? He didn’t know what to say after that, but he did stop drinking at the pub on the weekends, even when a surly Harry had attempted to guilt him into joining him for a post-break up drink. She must have forgotten their conversation, though, because he received an expensive brandy bottle as a birthday gift a few weeks after that. 

Two months later, she dropped by his desk with several boxes of takeout and her own version of butterbeer. 

“I love you,” he’d blurted out as she had kissed him goodnight.

He had looked into her eyes, searched the face he had seen in his dreams as a teen and had caressed on countless occasions as an adult for clues as to what she felt about them. She never smiled. She didn’t look sad or disgusted, either. She just stood still, as solid and unmovable as the door she held half open with her hand.

“I just…” He swallowed thickly and offered a smile. “I just wanted you to know.”

Again, she said nothing. 

“Well….g’night, Hermione.”

Her lips twitched with the ghost of a smile. “Goodnight, Ron.” 

They sent a couple of letters after that. It was mostly empty promises of meeting up, or spending some time together without his family or their friends present. Their schedules never really matched, though. And then she took a job in a reformation program, and her letters became little more than well-wishes with hearts sometimes scribbled at the end of the parchment. He would answer when time permitted it. Sometimes he’d doodle three hearts to accompany his updates. One with messy hair and large glasses, a thin one with freckles spotting the inside, and one with ridiculously bushy hair. She stopped asking for visits, as did he. 

Nights spent tossing and turning turned into nights spent drinking with old friends at the Hogshead, reminiscing about their misadventures at Hogwarts and quidditch teams that would never come close to being in the World Cup. And it was at this bar that he picked up a conversation with Pansy Parkinson.

He lost track of the times he returned to the bar to engage in idle chit chat. He had all but forgotten how many nights he’d spent talking about his family, work, and his humble ambitions with the pretty girl in the bar. He never realized that the mask he had been wearing for years had finally slipped off. He was no longer the man he had been while trying to attain someone who had been unattainable even as she had slept by his side. He no longer tossed and turned in bed, torn between becoming someone he was happy with, and being the person someone else might love. 

He quit his job at the Ministry and joined the staff at his brother’s business. He moved out of his parents’ house and into a swanky apartment filled with the heady smell of perfume and mostly green furniture. And he would daydream of coming home to kisses from his pretty girl dressed in sultry dresses. But his dreams of a house with several curly-haired children and a wife who almost always had her nose in a book were no more. 

The letter she had sent that rainy October night after a grueling day at work and six months apart had been the closest she had ever gotten to saying she loved him. But a hastily written ‘almost’ was not enough. Sometimes people needed to hear that they were loved. 

And sometimes you had to let them go so they could be happy, too. 

  
  
  
  
  



End file.
